siddMahen

It’s interesting to think about how the boundary components of the handcuffs are being transformed; this isotopy sends the inner boundary component of second link in the handcuffs to the outer boundary component!

Higher mathematics isn’t about performing fancy calculations — it’s rare to find a calculation that requires some higher mathematical tools that can’t be done more simply using elementary methods. So it’s no wonder people aren’t explicitly using higher mathematics everyday.

Instead, higher mathematics allows you to add powerful new features to your mental models, and reason about these features accurately and effectively. A key example: the Fourier transform. Understanding a signal in terms of its frequency components is immensely valuable for understanding how periodic phenomena work, and since periodic systems are ubiquitous, this often leads to concrete insights into concrete problems. With this more sophisticated understanding of the problem, you can write down a solution that can be implemented with “8th grade algebra and a little programming”. Other similar examples: singular value decomposition, spectral decomposition, probabilistic reasoning (MLE, Bayesian inference).

It’s important to equip people with the tools required to build powerful mental models of the world around them, so they can solve hard problems. Higher mathematics offers many such tools.

Bitcoin is by no means “an undetectable and untrackable financial system”.

I'm reading the bill right now, I don't know why there's such a fuss. The people who drafted this document are aware of these issues, and have taken active measures to make sure they aren't taken advantage of.

For example, this site says:

The current definition of "specialized service" (Article 2.15) increases costs and risk to internet users, and must be changed or deleted.

However, if you look at the actual definition in the bill [1], this has already been taken care of:

(15) "specialised service" means an electronic communications service or any other service that provides the capability to access specific content, applications or services, or a combination thereof, and whose technical characteristics are controlled from end-to-end or provides the capability to send or receive data to or from a determined number of parties or endpoints; and that is not marketed or widely used as a substitute for internet access service;

(Emphasis is my own.)

Similar arguments can be used for the rest of the sites' points. To be clear, I'm all for net neutrality, in fact, as a student I've personally benefited from this enormously. But it's unfair to say this bill is "threatening internet freedom". Rather, it seems like a big step forwards for consumers and telecom companies alike.

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/dae/docu...

This reminds me of a fantastic radio show I used to listen to in Canada called the Age of Persuasion (http://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/age-persuasion-from-cbc-r...). Great read.

I've spoken to both of my principals and my ICT teacher about introducing a solid computer science course and scraping "ICT". As a student and a avid programmer, I find it horrible that we don't get a chance to truly leverage the power of computers.

The reason I don't think CS is being widely adopted is because many students have been conditioned to accept ICT as a good computer course and have no clue as to what you can achieve with proper training and a computer. My classmates aren't interested in CS because they think it's way to difficult and has no tangible effect on society. On top of that, both of my previous ICT teachers had no clue how to program: those days were spent editing movies and making animations in Flash.

Glad to see the powers that be finally take some initiative to solve this problem...